A smart grid delivers electricity to consumers while leveraging digital communication and control technologies to minimize financial cost, save energy, and increase reliability. If designed properly, the smart grid will have a significant impact on improving a wide range of aspects in the electric power generation and distribution industry. Examples include self-healing, high-reliability, resistance to cyber-attack, accommodation of a wide variety of types of distributed generation and storage mechanisms, optimized asset allocation, and minimization of operation and maintenance expenses as well as high-resolution market control that incorporates advanced metering and demand-response.
An important component in operation of smart grids is fault detection, isolation, and restoration of the smart grid. Today, most of the distribution devices in a power network are communicatively coupled either in a star, mesh or a ring topology. The aforementioned communication topologies leads to a delay in detection of faults that occur at the distribution devices located far from the substation. The delay in detection of the fault results in less than optimal isolation of faults and a larger than necessary number of consumers experiencing service outages during the faults. Furthermore, restoration of power networks operating on these communication topologies is delayed and inefficient as these communication topologies lead to undesired congestion, collisions due to simultaneous transmissions and undue computations and management of distribution devices within the power network.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for embodiments of the invention.